The Lego Movie (2014)


director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
release-year: 2014
genres: animation, comedy, action
countries: USA
languages: English

An everyman-forced-into-hero-by-prophecy story, where the everyman is a little Lego construction worker with no redeeming qualities who is accidentally sucked up into a secret society of "master builders" who break all of the Lego instruction manual rules to fight the evil villain, Lord Business.

Spot the Batman.

The Lego characters hop in and out of classic Lego sets and collections, battling each other with slapstick shenanigans. Master builders can deus ex machina anything they need into existence, as can the enemy, so the story can quickly take us to whichever setting the next joke needs.

Anything can be rebuilt, so only the freeze ray is dangerous.

Half-way through it starts breaking a fourth wall, though not the fourth wall, as it gets all The Matrix-y with Emmet having visions of himself as a toy in the human world. Lord Business is boring old human dad Will Ferrell, a collector who dispassionately builds and glues Lego sets together, while Emmet is the embodied desires of Ferrell's young son who finds his dad's hobby unsatisfactory.

He must have spent a fortune on all of this.

Despite being the family breadwinner who probably fully deserves a hobby of his own, Ferrell is the bigger man and consents to let his kid play with Legos.

And not glue them together.

It's a fundamentally similar narrative construction as Wreck-It Ralph, with similar mood and joke delivery and character development and lessons or morality and limited-interaction-with-human-dimension and… ok, so it's basically Wreck-It Lego.

But anyone can fix it.